Andrew Robertson Long
Born November 13, 1956 in Houston, Texas
A self-made billionaire, Andrew Long is a businessman and politician who has run for office twice as an independent in his home state of Texas. In 2022, three years after switching his party affiliation to Republican, he began an independent presidential campaign in opposition to both Democratic incumbent Sam Seaborn and the eventual Republican nominee Alan Duke.
Long was born the second of five children to Ray (1922-1982) and Jeanne (nee Robertson; 1930-2017) Long. His father was a bank manager and World War II veteran who had relocated to Texas after the war. Growing up, Long was a gifted student in subjects that interested him, but a poor one in those that didn't. He graduated high school in 1974 and was accepted to Rice University, but dropped out after only one semester.
Instead, persuading his parents to give him his remaining college fund in lieu of attending classes, Long began his business career at 19. His first venture, a courier and transportation business, quickly floundered and its assests were sold to Federal Express (now known as FedEx) in 1977. A second venture, a retail hardware store, similarly failed. However, Long's purchase of the property his hardware store sat on was the seed for his eventual success. While Houston underwent a boom beginning in the late 1970s, Long quickly bought up both vacant suburban residential properties and blighted urban commercial properties, dangerously overleveraging himself in the process.
But his gamble paid off spectacularly--soon he was not only out of debt but fabulously rich as the rising price of real estate and increased demand fuelled his ability to buy increasingly expensive properties then sell them off to achieve even greater profits. By the beginning of the 1980s, he was, at 25 years of age, a millionaire and head of the Long Real Estate Group. A series of spin-off business from his real estate ventures, including a construction firm and warehousing businesses, had mixed results and Long came close to keeping himself only in the real estate business.
However, a business partner named Everett Schanzer persuaded Long to invest in the new cell phone market. After early returns surpassed Long's expectations, he increased his investment substantially, creating Maverick Mobile in 1992. Within ten years, the company stores and coverage in every major urban area in Texas and had begun expanding into Oklahoma and Louisiana. But nationwide carriers such as Verizon, AT&T and Sprint soon made up for the vacuum in the market that Long had filled and the company was bought out by T-Mobile in 2013. Both the sale to T-Mobile and the nearly quarter century of profits had exponentially increased Long's fortune: after the sale to T-Mobile, he was worth an estimated $900 million.
After the sale of Maverick Mobile, Long took a step back from the day-to-day running of his businesses for the first time since he was a college student. After becoming more involved in Houston civic institutions, he decided to try his hand at politics by announcing an independent campaign for governor in 2016.
Long's pitch as a pragmatic business executive who straddled the line between the Democratic and Republican parties resulted in a rare three-way race in the Lone Star state. The result was a photo finish, with all three candidates winning 33 percent of the vote: Long placed second with 33.2%, falling just 30,000 votes short of becoming governor.
Buoyed by the results, Long attempted to unseat Republican senator Davis Roberts in 2018. But facing an incumbent (the 2016 gubernatorial contest was an open one after Democratic incumbent John Hoynes announced his retirement after one term) and with Democrats nominating a star candidate in former First Lady Helen Santos, Long fell to a distant third. But even his final result of 21 percent of the vote was a terrific amount for a third-party candidate and Long found himself recruited by both parties in the aftermath of the 2018 campaign.
However, Long had always been a better fit for the Republican Party, having agreed with the party's business-centered economic agenda and been more sympathetic to the GOP's pro-life and pro-gun sentiment than the Democrats' stance on those issues. It was no surprise then that he announced that he had switched to the Grand Old Party in 2019, citing his shift rightwards on immigration. His switch set up a run in the 2022 Republican primaries, but in summer 2021, he announced that he would not run.
As former senator Alan Duke gained ground in the Republican primaries, Long increasingly came out against Duke and leveraged the threat of him running as an independent in an attempt to unite the party against Duke. However, his bluff failed; the non-Duke forces failed to coalesce, allowing the firebrand Oklahoman to win the nomination on less than 40 percent of the primary vote. With his ability to self-fund and wide name recognition in Texas, Long was easily able to assemble a proper campaign staff even before "anti-Duke" Republicans began seeking him out.
Long, who by the end of the Republican primaries, had come to personally dislike Duke, nonetheless appeared open to dropping out and endorsing him once the campaign reached into the fall in an echo of Howard Stackhouse's withdrawal and endorsement of Josiah Bartlet in 2002. The possibility, contingent on Duke's willingness to make amends with the factions of the party he had antagonized during his long career, was completely dashed by the selection of former general Lloyd Pendleton as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Long then paid for primetime coverage of a convention rally to introduce himself to the American people and announce his running mate.
He married his wife Sherri (nee Bradshaw) in 1983, and the pair have three children. In addition to his real estate group, Long has a diversified portfolio and is a minority owner in several businesses in Texas. His fortune is estimated to be approximately $1.5 billion.
